On the occasion of its reopening, mumok has invited the artist Jongsuk Yoon to conceive a new mural for the museum lobby. After photo-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, the most recent artist to create a mural was Siegfried Zaworka, who in his work dealt with the illusionist potentials of painting. Jongsuk Yoon now responds to the challenge of the monumental format with levitating, wholly anti-monumental and anti-heroic landscape pictures. Reduced means and the processuality of painting govern Yoon’s artistic practice, which she has developed in critical reflection of the paradigms of Western Modernism and East Asian traditions—particularly Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Korean sansuhwa (Mountain and Water Paintings). Diaphanous layers of large-scale, repeatedly smudged color patches, processual traces, and graphic ciphers condense to form panoramic “soul landscapes” (J. Yoon), in which “inner” and “outer” perspectives oscillate.

The title Kumgangsan (Diamond mountain) not only serves as a reminder that Korean cultural and philosophical history is shaped by its relationship to the country’s predominantly mountainous environment but also has an eminently political dimension. Kumgangsan is the painterly convergence on a mountain region that Yoon herself has never set foot on: The mountain massif, which today lies on North Korean territory on the border with South Korea, commemorates the arbitrary division of North and South Korea in 1945 and as such is a symbol of an unresolved geopolitical conflict and its still traumatizing aftermath.

Jongsuk Yoon was born in Onyang, South Korea, in 1965 and has lived in Europe since 1995. She studied at the universities of fine arts of Münster and Düsseldorf and at the Chelsea College of Art in London. Her works have been presented in numerous international exhibitions, including at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover; the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, South Korea; The Nordic Watercolor Museum in Skärhamn, Sweden; Museum Kurhaus Kleve; and Kunsthalle Münster. Yoon’s works are part of many public collections, including those of Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Zabludowicz Collection in London, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, and the Darlene M. and Jorge M. Pérez Art Collection in Miami.

(Curated by Heike Eipeldauer)